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Add Value, Demonstrate Expertise and Grow Your List

Guest post by: Kerri Salls

Article Overview: How can you add value for your prospect, demonstrate your unique expertise and grow your mailing list all at the same time? The powerful guerrilla marketing approach to do this is to create and use White Papers.

Add Value, Demonstrate Expertise and Grow Your List

How can you add value for your prospect, demonstrate your unique expertise and grow your mailing list all at the same time? The powerful guerrilla marketing approach to do this is to create and use White Papers.

Use White Papers to attract your ideal client. They have to give you contact information to receive it (online, simply an email address; offline, they need to provide a postal address). Either way, you get current information which will let you continue to market to them.

Use White Papers to demonstrate your expertise, to share what you know, so your prospects get a sense of who you are, how you think and what value you might be able to offer them.

Use WhitePapers to test the market for your next idea: be it in the form of a book, a course, a new service, or a new product you are conceiving.

Use White Papers to promote your new/upcoming book, course, service, product. If you get enough traffic to warrant the development effort, only then do you invest time and resources. If you get no nibbles, then you know you need to refinethe concept before you invest in full development. This goes for an information product, a software product, consulting services or any new niche development.

If you are writing a book, you can pilot the short version of each chapter as a white paper and build a following anxious for the next piece. Once you've published each draft chapter as a white paper, you'll have a strong list demanding the final product; feedback and criticism to ensure the final book will be solid; and your expertise will be proven before your book is published, ensuring a more successful book launch.

Before publication, offer a downloadable white paper on the topic you address in your book. This allows you to test market interest your book and gain early reader feedback on your ideas. White papers are certainly easier and faster to write and produce than a book, which makes them ideal for testing the waters of reader interest. In addition to helping you fine-tune your book's title, content, and marketing copy, you can use your download data to prove the popularity of your topic to prospective literary agents and publisher acquisition editors.

Use White Papers after you release a book, product, or presentation to drive traffic back to your offering.Your White Paper will continue to help you attract potential book/product buyers and build your mailing list. When website visitors download your white paper, you can include an extra page describing your book and its contents in detail.

You can also use additional white papers to test the market for information products that leverage off your book/product/service; such as worksheets, in-depth reports on special topics, audios and videos, and yearly updates.

Follow this advice from Roger Parkerand your White Paper will deliver the 'all-in-one' results you want:



To succeed, your white paper must educate and inform, rather than sell. Start your white paper by describing, in an editorial format, a problem or goal your market faces. Follow-up with an analysis of previous attempts to address the issue (and why they don't work) and thendescribe your new and better way of addressing the problem. All of this should lead up to a description of your book, program, service, producton the last page.

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Article Tags: add value, expertise, grow your list, white papers



Related Forum Posts
Re: My 3 best business books - 1. Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill 2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey 3. Permission Marketing - Seth Godin Think and Grow Rich seems more powerful each time I read it or dip into it. The 7 Habits not only offers some very effective ways to organize your life (which I have yet to master!), but also some great quotations and thought provoking statements including this by Nazi concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl: [i:2naxzsom]Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.[/i:2naxzsom] Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a good read for anybody seeking to understand how to approach doing business on the Internet in the right way with regard to winning people's trust.
Re: My 3 best business books - It seems that Napoleon Hill works help a lot of business men. He had done a really good job. I bought Think and Grow Rich many times.
Re: Email autoresponder messages: what delivery intervals? - Sub-lists are primarily created around the products I own. If my list A was about one topic, I will not promote anything to that list about another topic until I first have them opt-in to another list. Example of this is, let's say you were interested in internet marketing and you opted-in to a list for driving traffic (List A). I will not send information about product creation tips to that list unless I first have you opt-in for another list (List B). These two may be close enough so that might not be an issue, but what I find is most internet marketers drive all their promotions to their one and only list they own. So one day, it's about teaching mom-pop offline businesses about marketing, another day about oh let's market on Facebook, next day about, hey I found great product on promoting stuff on Mobile or cell phones, next week, let's talk about Amazon's Kindle, then Pinterest... You get what I mean. If I have to do above, it will be after subscribers decided not to buy any of my own products. Then I will send other promos to that list. But I think by minimum, it's good to create sub-lists for buyers of your own products so that you can send more advanced and higher end items exclusive to that list.
Think and Grow Rich - Hi Moira, What a great post! I completely agree with it and it really is too easy to underestimate those 3 points but once we learn to use them the sky is the limit. I am currently reading Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill. Have you read that book?
More profile options - [quote="Evan":11og2qr1]Hello everyone - I wanted to drop another reminder about the profile options - you can now add your favorite entrepreneur and favorite business book which I'm glad to see people doing! Any other suggestions for new fields to add so we can learn more about our fellow community members? How about favorite business quote?[/quote:11og2qr1] Hi Evan, To build on Aaron's comments, you could add a field called "Area of Expertise" so that people will know what value a particular member can bring to the table. Another form of "social glue" would be to display a user's interests because people like to do business with and talk to people they like above all else.


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